Page 239
By Jack Joseph Smith
When the house had been emptied people began to
receive a notion about her acts; but answer had
no possibility of registering going beyond symbol. In the last
dress that she wore, and with nothing in her hands,
she had walked in the long hung cloth colors of
earth and sun and moon down through the high sand
to the lifeguard tower above the sea.
Now on the arrival of Jaqueline and Animal Maria
was at her seventh day of fasting and meditation;
and for this day Hart Street had been waiting, for
during the morning of her first day under the tower,
with no lifeguard at all, young Maria had softly
spoken to the teenaged girls in wonder and psyche-
delic willingness to the wish long gone to seed,
"in seven days I shall give birth under this sky to
Jesus of Los Angeles."
Through the seven days there had been tributes of
flowers, and offers of fruit. Tourists had passed by
Maria's remaining still. Some eyes had attempted to
penetrate her world with scorn. Others were sensitive
to living out the flash into the dream. Low or high
state of reaction seemed to mean little to Maria, for
the calmness of her forehead showed that her eyes re-
mained the same under lids or opened to the sun or
moon, or weighty seldom summer glimpses of Los Angeles star-
light over the beamed out congested confuseion of el-